u/Johnny--Arcade

Hi, it's your friendly Game UI guy.

I love Indie to death, and I'm always rooting for you guys, but I tend to see the same classic problems repeated again and again in your HUD design - and I want to help.

In the past 6 years, I’ve probably critiqued or fixed 100+ portfolios with who knows how many HUD designs therein. From just pure repetition, I think I have the core problems down to about 4ish.

Kitchen Sinking It

Designers tend to be maximalists: everything gets thrown in and *eventually* - that’s a video game. Your task as the UI Artist is to remove about 99% of that.

So your first move is to constantly look at the elements of your HUD and ask: does this even need to be here at all?

  Examples: currency in your game. Invariably you’ll pick up gold or credits or what have you. This info rarely stays up indefinitely but rather fades over time. This is especially true if currency has no strategic value at the moment - aka - you can’t spend the money right now. 

  An exception to this would be your “souls” in a soulsborne game, where your currency bankrupts after a death and that tension is part of the emotional core loop. 

I Don’t Have Time for This

Second question: does any information change dramatically over a short period of time? If it does, it probably should be on the HUD: health, mana, ammo, etc. 

But if it’s what I like to call “Glacial Information”, info that changes graaaaaadually if at all moment-to-moment; it should be sidelined, a pop-up widget, or cleverly inset in another other HUD widget.

  Example: Experience points. For levels 1-5ish, you’re probably leveling up like crazy every ten minutes or so. But by mid-game, leveling may trickle to once every few hours of gametime. Having an experience bar that barely grows by a picometer is not informative at that point. And if it's not informative - and therefore easily ignored - it shouldn’t be there.

Ahhh Loud noises!!!

I bet you were designing the HUD in a nice, quiet, safe environment, right? Big mistake. Crazy explosion here, a bunch of damage numbers flying there, “REVIVE ME!” screaming through your soundblaster 16, etc. etc.

You need to design around the idea that the HUD, in its proper context, is for when shit gets real - and when the game is at its most distracting. Plan around the greatest amount of color and competing stimulus behind and ON your HUD.

Examples: boss battles are a unique expression of this idea. How many times do you glance up nervously at your health and then the boss’? If you couldn’t see your teammate needing a revive, that’s a wipe. If a cooldown timer is too obscure and it costs you the fight, that’s a controller-throw. There is no tension quite like a boss fight, and if your HUD wasn’t properly tooled for huge amounts of overriding stimulus, you didn’t design it properly. 

Big and Tall UI Warehouse.

Take a look at the original Demon’s Souls. That HUD is goddamn ENORMOUS, like Shaq held them at gunpoint or something. Now look at Elden Ring - effectively decades of refinement in the same genre. Everything is trimmed down, non-informative elements removed and the HUD even fades over time if you’re at full health (I see you there, distracting not-full mana bar, hi)

You should be trimming everything down as much as you can. This does NOT hold true for your font, which should have a comfortable reading size… and then you should bump those rookie numbers up even more. Lots of people have garbage-eyes, but everyone deserves to see your game.

And that’s it! As ever, it’s extremely hard to make Game HUDs with no prior experience and all alone - so I hope this helps - especially you junior UI Artist hopefuls trying to break in to the Industry. I’m rootin’ for you.

That’s it. Seeeya. 

Hey all, it's your beloved distant cousin from the Game UI/UX side of things.

Most of my inner circle are either other Game Developers of junior hopefuls trying to break in as UI Artists - so I'm in a bubble when it comes to the overall UI UX market.

Every once in awhile a Product Designer or Frontend Dev makes their way to me trying to make the jump, but I just realized we never really talked about the job market that they *just* came from.

So, open-ended question: from *your* perspective, what is the health of the "general" UI UX job market in 2026? Personal experiences and anecdotes are cheerfully welcome.

Bonus question: and where do you think it will be in 2027?

Thanks from your Cuz!

I keep hearing some variation of the same self-deprecating joke from Product Designers:

"The most creative part of my job is light mode vs. dark mode and a button color."

Funny stuff, sure. But I kept hearing it over the years.

I work in game UI design, and I'm always struck how different our two worlds are in spite of roughly the same skillset ~ and today it made me genuinely curious rather than dismissive.

Not saying anyone should jump into games (you probably shouldn't!) — just curious what's actually the most creative part of your day-to-day. Or was the joke more of a cry for help?

Hey y'all, big time lurker.

Game UI design portfolios don't pop up here very often, but they carry a completely different set of rules than Web or App Design portfolios.

After reviewing and tearing down hundreds of Game UI portfolios over the years, I'm begging you, for the love of your future as a gamedev, please fix these problems in your Game UI Design Portfolio.

(This is intended for Game UI UX Designers, but I truly feel *any* Creative Portfolio can benefit from a quick read!)

—-

Please Fix Your Colossal Case Studies. The Studio is not looking at your UI Portfolio to hire a writer, and if they were, they’d hire the writer that knows a picture is worth 1000 words.

The longer the text, the more chances the Art Director’s attention will fade and they'll gloss over your words - then they'll gloss over all of your hard work. Make your images explore your process and trim the writeup to context, challenge, and lessons. 

Please Fix Hiding Your Skills and Programs. Some roles are dependent on knowing a specific program. Place your Tech Stack front and center, and if you have keyword-hot skills the role is asking for, make sure those are featured prominently. 

Advanced Meta: If there is a UI UX vacancy, the odds that they have the expertise to identify a good UI Artist is low. So they’ll likely revert to looking for skills and programs *they think* a good UI Artist should have. 

Please Fix all the Fluff in your Portfolio. Fluff, in this case, is obvious bloat - trying to add more water to the milk, as I like to say. Examples: you have one entire screen for a handful of (small) logos. You have pages on Accessibility… ideas. You show a HUD with a few widgets. 

Do the opposite of bloat: explore the depth of your work. Add modals, state changes, and call-outs instead.

Please Fix your Portfolio for the Art Director. These poor Art Directors have to look at an *infinite* number of Portfolios, and each one is worse than the last.

Dirty Trick: pick your strongest case study and place it first in the grid - then give it a unique border. It's very likely the Art Director will click on this (and it’s just as likely they only have one click in them.). Control the flow directly to your best work - and you’ll control their overall impression of you.

Please Fix Showing Your Process. It takes no effort to Gen a completed HUD these days, and even a human-designed final screen doesn’t tell them much beyond “it’s better than what I can do.” You need to show Process.

Organized Market Research, Rough concepts, Wireframe development, how you zigged and zagged to get to the final deliverables. For Game UI, they need your ingenuity *slightly* more than they need your labor.  

...and that's it! Thanks for making it this far. I just didn't want you all building in the blind.